Keselowski, who has a 20-point lead on Johnson going into the season finale, spent practice Friday working on both race and qualifying setups while Johnson spent it working on qualifying.

“Qualifying has not been a strong suit,” Keselowski said. “To put on some kind of decent showing for that is important. … I fully expected him to out-qualify us, to be honest, and I was going to be fine with that.

“I was prepared for the worst, and that’s not what happened, so I guess we’re OK.”

Drivers will have 110 minutes of practice Saturday in preparation for the race, where Joey Logano (with a qualifying lap of 176.056 mph) will start from the pole while Marcos Ambrose (175.342) will start from the outside of the front row.

Keselowski posted a lap of 175.092 mph around the 1.5-mile oval while Johnson ran 174.081.

“I worked real hard to get the car in the ballpark and look forward to (Saturday) and being in race trim,” Johnson said. “We’ll work through our race stuff and I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

Johnson said he wished he had won the pole to put pressure on Keselowski.

“A lot of the guys that were fast in race trim weren’t so good in qualifying—the packages are far different,” Johnson said. “There are some trends you can carry over and we’ll take we learned today and apply to our race setup.